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<h2>Tutorial 2: Life</h2> 
By Sean Luke
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[<a href="tutorial1.html">Tutorial 1</a> documentation]&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;[<a href="tutorial2.html">Tutorial 2</a> documentation]
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<p>Tutorial 2 is a simple visualization of the <a href="">John Conway's</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life">Game of Life</a>, later popularized in a column by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gardner">Martin Gardner</a>.  Life is a two-dimensional totalistic cellular automaton, where each cell in the grid simultaneously decides to be "alive" or "dead" based on the following rules:

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<li>If a cell has less than live two neighbors (up/down/left/right -- no diagonal neighbors), is dead in the next iteration, presumably of loneliness.
<li>If a cell has more than three live neighbors, it is dead in the next iteration from suffucation.
<li>If a live cell has two or three live neighbors, it stays alive in the next iteration.
<li>If a dead cell has exactly three live neighbors, it comes alive in the next iteration.
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<p>The initial conditions of the automaton are set to Martin Gardner's so-called  <a href="http://www.radicaleye.com/lifepage/picgloss/picgloss.html">B-Heptomino</a>.  More on Life from <a href="http://www.radicaleye.com/lifepage/lifepage.html">Paul's Page</a> and from <a href="http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Life.html">MathWorld</a>.

<p><b>Where is Tutorial 1 in the simulation list?</b> Tutorial 1 is a command-line example only, with no GUI.

<p><hr><font color='red'>Note:</font> this description is different from the one which appears after following the tutorial documentation.  This is because the tutorial documentation overrides the <tt>getInfo</tt> method to provide a description.  If this method is not overridden, MASON instead tries to display a file called <tt>index.html</tt> stored in the same directory as the simulation (which is what's going on here). 

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